Evaluation of an educational intervention programme on Education for Sustainable Development in the Physical Education teacher training

The main objective was to analyse the improvements that Physical Education (PE) teachers notice in their teaching self-efficacy and sustainability consciousness after experimenting with an intervention programme. The research took an empirical-analytical approach with a quasi-experimental study and pre- and post-intervention measures. The sample consisted of 55 participants (47.27% female), whose mean age was 22.21±4.02 years. They were all students of the Primary Education PE degree PE. The instruments used for data collection were the Teachers Self-Efficacy Scale for SDE (Malandrakis et al., 2019b) and the Sustainability Consciousness Questionnaire (Gericke et al., 2019). A descriptive data analysis was performed, and Student’s T- and Wilcoxon tests were applied to calculate statistical significance whenever appropriate. Finally, effect size and statistical power were calculated. The self-efficacy analysis revealed statistically significant differences for the four analysed dimensions (values, systems thinking, emotions, actions), and systems thinking was the best performer. Participants obtained the best pre-intervention results for social sustainability consciousness, but presented the narrowest range of improvement, unlike environmental and economic sustainability consciousness. Therefore, it can be affirmed that the programme positively impacted the variables studied in the participants, which promotes the need for such active and experiential interventions to be made in the PE teacher training field.